Ricardo Lagos

Ricardo Froilan Lagos Escobar (2 March 1938-) was President of Chile from 11 March 2000 to 11 March 2006, succeeding Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle and preceding Michelle Bachelet. He was leader of the Party for Democracy.

Biography
Ricardo Froilan Lagos Escobar was born in Santiago, Chile on 2 March 1938, and he was a member of the Radical Party of Chile from 1959 to 1961, when he became a lawyer and a Socialist Party of Chile member. During the 1970s, he became an "independent of the left", and he and his family went into exile in Argentina following the 1973 Chilean coup d'etat. He returned to Chile in 1978 and played a major role in the country's transition to democracy, serving as a leader of the Socialist Party and emerging as the main figure behind the "No" campaign for the 1988 plebiscite as to whether to extend Augusto Pinochet's rule over the country for another eight years. In 1987, he founded the Party for Democracy as a social democratic alternative to the Socialist Party, and he was elected President in 2000 after narrowly defeating Independent Democratic Union candidate Joaquin Lavin. In 2004, he resolved a border dispute with Bolivia, and he also signed free trade agreements with Europe, the United States, South Korea, China, New Zealand, Singapore, and Brunei. He left office in 2006 and went on to become involved with United Nations work.